Bitter Spoils

The messy, scandal-sheet divorce proceedings between Alec and Jocelyne Wildenstein may open the door on the secret history of the art world’s richest and most powerful family. From the intelligence network the Wildensteins created to accusations they collaborated with the Nazis, to the legendary contents of their vaults in New York and Switzerland, the author explores four generations of an insular art-dealing dynasty whose $5 billion fortune, Gulfstream IV, racing stable, private Virgin Island compound, and 66,000-acre Kenya ranch cannot erase the rancorous legacy handed down from father to son to son.

Last September, Daniel Wildenstein’s family celebrated his 80th birthday with a party at the two-star restaurant Laurent, one of Paris’s most fashionable spots. It was an intimate dinner, for about 70 guests, to which Daniel’s 64-year-old second wife, Sylvia, had invited only her husband’s closest friends and his family, whose members had flown in for the occasion from New York, Montreal, and Palm Beach, some of them on the family’s private Gulfstream IV. Daniel’s two sons, Alec, 57, and Guy, 52, and Guy’s wife, Kristina, were there, as were all six of his grandchildren. Most of the friends in attendance that night were from the horse-racing world, trainers and jockeys who had worked with the Wildensteins over the years. Horse racing was the old man’s passion, and his stable, Allez France, is considered among the best in Europe.

Almost no one from the international art world was there, even though there were few people in that world whom Daniel Wildenstein, probably the richest and most powerful art dealer on earth, didn’t know. Wildenstein, always aloof from his peers, rarely ventured out in recent years, except for regular excursions to the track and his office.

As friends and family toasted him that night, Daniel appeared relaxed and happy. It was an evening devoted to celebration, and there was a lot to celebrate. So many things had turned out as he had planned. In the three and a half decades since he had taken over the 123-year-old family business from his father, Georges, Daniel had added greatly to the luster of the Wildenstein name and also amassed enormous wealth; estimated at more than $5 billion, his fortune was the only one of that magnitude ever made in the art market. People didn’t trifle with him or with his family, over which he maintained an iron control.

They said behind his back that he was “mean,” “ruthless,” and “frightening,” but few really knew him, because that was how he wanted it. Other families had their public scandals, but his did not. Over the years he had made sure very little had been written about it in the press. After all, he sold art to some of the world’s greatest collectors—Mellons, Annenbergs, David-Weills—people who valued secrecy and privacy as much as he did. His family’s vaults, hidden around Europe and America, contained one of the largest private collections of masterpieces in the world. It is believed that some of the paintings have not been seen in decades by anyone except Wildensteins—there is a rumor of a long-hidden Vermeer, and, according to Alec Wildenstein, Georges used to travel with a rolled-up Velázquez which was virtually unknown.

Daniel seemed determined to enjoy his birthday party as if nothing were wrong. But things were going wrong. Several days earlier, Alec had been arrested and thrown in jail, charged with threatening his estranged wife, Jocelyne, with a gun in their bedroom in the family’s Manhattan town house. The next morning, Alec’s face, haggard after a night in prison, was plastered across the tabloids.

Ever since the news of Alec and Jocelyne’s bitter divorce broke, three months before the birthday party, the press had been filled with stories about the Wildenstein family. Friends were stunned that they were finally making headlines. Some blamed Jocelyne for leaking information to the press. “It’s her way of taking revenge on people who never, never have their names in the paper,” says a friend of Sylvia’s. Daniel, faced with the unprecedented situation of a loose cannon, seemed to be doing exactly the wrong thing: he declared war on Jocelyne, cutting off her credit cards and trying to have her barred from the family’s homes, including the New York town house, the Château de Marienthal (reportedly the largest private residence in metropolitan Paris), the 66,000-acre Kenya ranch, and the family’s private island compound in the British Virgins.

But Jocelyne refused to be intimidated. After 19 years in the family, she had a powerful trump card: the stories no one had ever heard. Among those who seemed to be interested were the F.B.I. and the New York State tax authorities, which, sources close to Jocelyne say, have already been in touch with her. The entire art world was riveted. “Jocelyne could be the thread that unravels the whole sweater,” says a collector who has known the Wildensteins for two decades. “She could open up the whole story.”

On September 3, the day Alec was released from jail, The New York Times ran a story about artworks that had been stolen by the Nazis in 1940 and discovered recently in the possession of the Wildensteins. The report might have passed with little notice had it not been for Daniel’s comment to the newspaper that because the victims hadn’t come forth at the time they had no rights now. The remark was so “absolutely unbelievable, so breathtakingly unbelievable,” as one prominent art dealer put it, that it created a second controversy. People had whispered for years about the origins of the Wildenstein collection—that, despite their being French Jews themselves, they had made money by trafficking in art looted by the Nazis. The family has always dismissed such talk. “If you think something is ridiculous, why even comment on it?” says Alec.

The Wildenstein gallery on East 64th Street is the most sumptuous private gallery in New York. Built for the family in 1932 by Horace Trumbauer, whose firm also built the Widener library at Harvard and the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Louis XVI–style town house, down the street from the family’s Manhattan home, features a reception area with soaring 30-foot ceilings, marble floors, and a grand staircase that was modeled on the one in the Wildensteins’ headquarters in Paris, an 18th-century hôtel particulier on the Rue de la Boétie. In the basement, and in those of the three adjoining buildings, which the Wildensteins are believed to own, are lead-lined vaults. At one point, their inventory was said to include some 400 Italian primitives, two Botticellis, eight paintings each by Rembrandt and Rubens, three Velázquezes, nine El Grecos, five Tintorettos, 79 Fragonards, and seven Watteaus, not to mention an enormous collection of Impressionist paintings. No other art dealer in the world today has the stock of paintings and sculptures that the Wildensteins do. “If it’s obtainable privately,” says one prominent art collector, “the Wildensteins will have it. No one has their resources.”

In March 1997, James Marrow, a professor of art history at Princeton, was invited to the New York gallery to examine eight rare illuminated medieval manuscripts worth several million dollars. He had been asked to do so by Sam Fogg, a London dealer, who was interested in purchasing one or more of the works. Marrow remembers being awed by the beauty of the sacred books as he sat in one of the gallery’s upstairs viewing rooms, but he was also concerned. “I saw the numbers immediately,” he says, referring to reddish pencil markings, “ka,” followed by the numbers 879 through 886, of the kind made by the Nazis on artworks they had stolen. Marrow says he guessed that the numbers indicated that at some point the manuscripts had belonged to the Kann family, important French Jewish art collectors. But he couldn’t tell which member of the large Kann family had owned them or when. Joseph Baillio, the Wildensteins’ respected expert in 18th-century French art, also seemed confused about who had owned the manuscripts. “He said he thought it was the Kanns, but he didn’t say which one. He looked at registration cards and went to the gallery’s library to check, but he kept saying he didn’t know,” says Marrow. “I knew, with a dealer, that’s not right.” (Baillio denies ever speaking with Marrow about the previous owners of the manuscripts.)

Unable to get a clear proof of title from the dealer, Fogg ultimately backed out. In the meantime, a German manuscript expert Marrow had contacted sent back notes from the Nazi archives in Koblenz. They described the manuscripts in detail and listed them as part of the art collection of Alphonse Kann, stolen by the Nazis from his home near Paris in October 1940 after he had fled to London. Marrow contacted Kann’s great-nephew, Francis Warin, in Paris. He was shocked to learn that Warin already knew the Wildensteins had the manuscripts—thanks to an investigation by Hector Feliciano, the author of the groundbreaking 1995 book The Lost Museum, about art looted from French Jews by the Nazis. Warin had been trying to get them back, and it was in the midst of this effort that the Wildensteins, having held the manuscripts in their vaults for more than 40 years, had tried to sell them.

The Wildensteins had rejected Warin’s claim. First, Guy Wildenstein had written to say the manuscripts had been bought by his grandfather Georges from Alphonse Kann “before the Second World War.” A later response from a Wildenstein attorney insisted that three of the manuscripts had been bought not from Alphonse Kann but from Edouard Kann, a distant cousin, in 1909. Either way, the Wildensteins contended, the manuscripts had been stolen by the Germans from their Paris gallery—not from Alphonse Kann’s home—and returned to them after the war.

In September, Daniel Wildenstein gave The New York Times yet a different story. He said the manuscripts had been bought from Edouard Kann by Georges Wildenstein’s father, Nathan, sometime between 1903 and 1914, and he had documents to prove it. He said they had been looted not from the gallery, but from a Wildenstein vault at the Banque de France and then returned after the war. Stunningly, he dismissed the “ka” markings as insignificant. “I can’t understand the claim,” he said. “It’s an absolutely crazy thing, 100 years after an object was bought to come with a claim without any paper whatsoever. They claim it 50 years later? They had no claim for 50 years? I tell you something. If tomorrow someone steals a picture from me, I make a declaration to the police that it’s stolen. After 30 years, the man who stole it owns it.”

In December, Alec Wildenstein agreed to meet with Vanity Fair to talk about the Kann manuscripts, and about his family and their history. It is one of the rare interviews on these subjects that any member of the family has ever given.

Sitting at a long table in a conference room he has rented for the meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, Alec is flanked by his attorneys. He is short, like his father and brother, and he has an owlish face that makes him seem much younger than his 57 years. A little nervous now, he fingers a stack of papers in front of him, which includes notes from a conversation he had with his father to prepare for our interview. “I am speaking today,” Alec says, “only because I feel there are so many crazy things said that I feel it’s important to put the truth in order.”

Alec makes it clear that the last few months have been difficult for his family. He is fearful that the press attention has made them vulnerable to kidnappers—or, as Jews, targets for Arab terrorists. He says he and Guy have hired security guards for Alec’s two children, Diane, 18, and Alec junior, 17, and Guy’s son, David, 18, and three daughters, Vanessa, 16, Olivia, 14, and Samantha, 12. As Alec views it, the Kann-manuscript controversy is linked to the furor over Jocelyne. “Let’s look at it objectively. [Alphonse] Kann after the war claimed objects. None of [the manuscripts] was ever mentioned. For good reason. They were no longer in his possession,” Alec says. “The person who is claiming something now is a nephew who has no idea of what he is doing. He is probably pushed by someone to create the problem.… He is trying to be a nuisance factor. He is doing what my wife is doing. He is thinking that, by embarrassing us, we will give him something.”

“When one is the legal owner of important works of art,” Francis Warin says, “it would be absurd and nonsense not to claim them from the moment one knows their actual location. It is what we are doing with all the works of art that belonged to Alphonse Kann, which we are locating and tracing now.” It is true that Alphonse Kann never claimed the manuscripts after the war. He was an old man by then and he had never made an inventory of his vast art collection. “He made many claims from memory,” says Feliciano, who tracked the manuscripts using Nazi looting inventories and also U.S. Army archives in Washington. Although Feliciano and Warin have so far been unable to determine how Georges Wildenstein got five of the eight manuscripts after the war, three were put on display at the French National Library in 1949 in the hopes that their owner would come forward. Kann had died in 1948, and no one from his family showed up to claim them, but Georges Wildenstein did. Despite doubts by curators at the library, they handed them over to Wildenstein. “The records indicate that he pushed hard to get them,” says Feliciano.

Alec Wildenstein insists that his grandfather owned the manuscripts. Like his father, he says the family has proof of this, which it cannot divulge, because of possible legal action by the Kann heirs. Alec also contends that the “ka” markings may not have been Nazi markings at all. “I saw the Wildenstein and the Rothschild [art looted by the Nazis],” Alec says. “The Rothschild and Wildenstein [art] was done in ink. I never saw something done in pencil.… I don’t see why the Germans would have done anything in pencil, because it’s easy to erase something in pencil.”

Feliciano disagrees. “This is how they marked: in pencil,” he says. Despite the evidence that the Germans stole the manuscripts from the home of Alphonse Kann—including the fact that the manuscripts were listed, with the numbers attached, in a Nazi inventory of Kann’s collection—probably no one today knows whether Georges Wildenstein, who died in 1963, claimed them because he believed he owned them or merely saw an opportunity and took it.

Alec was nine years old when his grandfather claimed the manuscripts, and anything he knows about the war years, he says, he was told by his father. One feels some sympathy for him as he tries to defend his grandfather and father with their version of events. In fact, friends say that this is the story of Alec’s life—doing what Daniel tells him to. Indeed, in his divorce battle, Alec, nearing 60, has claimed that he has almost nothing he can call his own. His father controls all the assets, and, according to one of Jocelyne’s divorce affidavits, the bills are mostly paid through a mysterious network of corporations and accounts. “I am told that none of the family businesses or properties, including the properties used exclusively by my husband and me, are in my husband’s name. ‘On paper’ everything is owned by my elderly father-in-law or by foreign corporations,” reads the affidavit.

Nor was Alec’s life really his own. From the time he and his brother, Guy, were born, it was assumed they would follow their father into the family business. “I never had a choice. There was none,” Alec says. “I was told from since I was like this, I would be an art dealer.”

Even in her anger at her husband, Jocelyne is sympathetic. “When you are 57 and you’re still the son and you’re still the same as when you were 17,” says Jocelyne in her thick French accent, “when you run a business so big like this … but you still have your father behind yourself all the time as the shadow, you’re never your own master. When you reach 50 you like to have a certain freedom because it’s really the time you can show you achieved something.”

As Alec defends his family, he seems not to be terribly engaged. Like his father, he appears not to realize how serious the current challenges are. “You’d think, especially with all the activity with Swiss accounts and all these new questions about looted art, that they’d admit a mistake was made, apologize, and return the manuscripts,” says one major New York dealer. But that, say people who know the Wildensteins, has never been the Wildenstein style. “They will pursue a law case to the end. They don’t seem to care how badly they come out of it looking,” says the same dealer.

“In some ways it is very difficult for them to think that they are wrong,” explains an old friend of Alec’s, who admits that even he was taken aback by the aggressiveness of the family’s response. “It is about winning,” says one art expert. “Daniel has to win.” A man who has worked for the Wildensteins sees it differently: “They feel they are superior to other people,” he says simply.

The Kann manuscript dispute is not the only controversy involving provenance that the family has been embroiled in. In 1983 an elderly German woman, Gerda Dorothea DeWeerth, learned that a painting by Monet stolen from her during World War II had been sold to a New York art collector by the Wildensteins in 1957. The painting, according to a judge’s ruling in the 11-year legal battle, appeared to have been bought by the Wildensteins from a Swiss dealer named François Reichenbach. In a 1984 deposition, former Wildenstein president Harry Brooks indicated that the Wildensteins did not know from whom Reichenbach had gotten the painting. But court documents revealed that there was another version of the painting’s provenance in the Wildenstein records. In his definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné on Monet, completed in 1992, Daniel had skipped over Reichenbach and DeWeerth, claiming his family had obtained Champs de Blé à Vetheuil directly from Monet’s dealer Durand-Ruel.

The court never addressed the provenance discrepancy, because in 1994 it upheld an earlier court ruling that DeWeerth had not searched hard enough for the painting. Alec, nevertheless, insists his father’s story was right: “What Harry Brooks knew about Monet you could put on the head of a pin. My father was the man who made the book on Monet. He started when I was born, and it took him 45 years to bring it out.”

Provenance is not the only gray area surrounding certain paintings sold by the Wildensteins. Last October, shortly before Sotheby’s was to put at auction the estate of Mildred Allen, widow of Charles Allen Jr., who was head of the New York investment firm of Allen & Co., it withdrew from the sale a painting by Manet that Allen had bought from Wildenstein in 1959. Art experts examined the painting, La Liseuse, and raised questions about its authenticity. “A painting like that may not have been seen in many years,” says an auction-house official who examined it. “This is a real humdinger, because it is [certified as authentic] in the catalogue raisonné that Daniel Wildenstein co-wrote.” Today the validity of the painting is still in question. “Our opinion and Mr. Wildenstein’s opinion is that this is an authentic painting,” says Thomas Bolan of Putney, Twombly, Hall & Hirson, which represents the Allen estate. However, as Bolan himself acknowledges, art experts consulted so far do not agree, so it remains off the market. “There’s no resolution. It’s still under a lot of investigation,” says Bolan. “We’re getting other opinions.”

Alec Wildenstein dismisses those who doubt that the painting is a Manet: “We happen to make the book on Manet. I think we know a bit more about Manet than either Sotheby’s or Christie’s.”

The issue of the authenticity of Wildenstein paintings also came up in 1992 when the New York developer Arnold Gumowitz sued Wildenstein & Co., claiming that Peasant Laboring, a painting attributed to Georges Seurat that he had bought for $600,000 from the gallery in 1987, had been questioned by a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also claimed that the man who authenticated the painting had been paid by the Wildensteins. According to Gumovitz’s attorney, John Hughes, in 1995, the case was settled in a confidential out-of-court agreement.

In another 1992 incident, Laura Holtz, who was then the Wildensteins’ photo archivist, was assigned to organize photographs of the works of the 18th-century sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, which Wildenstein had just bought from the leading Houdon authority, Harvard Arnason. As Holtz sorted through them, she says, she checked the Wildensteins’ library for references to Houdon and was shocked to find that in the margin of one monograph, next to the photo of the sculpture Princesse Clothilde Xavier, was the pencil marking “fake, as per Harvard Arnason.”

Holtz says she immediately informed her boss, Joseph Baillio, then a vice president of Wildenstein. “He said to me, ‘We can’t tell Paris it’s a fake. We own that Houdon, and we can’t say it’s a fake.’ ” Holtz says, “I’d written ‘fake’ on the file, and he said, ‘Erase it!’ I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ whereupon he started screaming at me and said, ‘You do what I tell you to do,’ and he walked out and slammed the door.”

Two months later, in the middle of an argument with Baillio, Holtz raised the issue of the fake Houdon, and she says she was fired the following day. When she told Baillio that she would tell Guy Wildenstein about the statue, she says that the towering Baillio grabbed her, severely injuring her shoulder. Holtz filed a lawsuit against Baillio and the gallery for assault and battery. Rather than settle, Wildenstein fought her all the way to a jury trial. Last June, a jury determined that Baillio had “touch[ed] the plaintiff Laura Holtz in a hostile or offensive manner,” but acquitted Baillio and Wildenstein of all charges. Asked to comment, a Wildenstein spokesperson says, “Holtz’s allegations were rejected by the jury, and their verdict speaks for itself.” Holtz now intends to appeal the decision.

The mysteries surrounding Wildenstein artworks have been heightened by the fact that the family has sold masterpieces that scholars and collectors had long lost track of. Three years ago, the prominent investment banker and art collector Michel David-Weill is said to have paid several million dollars to acquire Jacques-Louis David’s Psyche (circa 1780) from the Wildensteins. An old-master dealer, who had himself been searching for the painting for years, recalls that even the Louvre had no idea where it was.

In their efforts to maintain total privacy, the Wildensteins have created an operation that is a secret state unto itself. No one, not even employees, really knows what they own or where it is. In fact, the art is secreted in vaults around Switzerland, in an old nuclear bunker in upstate New York, and in a converted firehouse on New York’s Upper East Side, among other places. The Wildensteins themselves can’t keep track of what they own. “I mean, there are pictures I have never seen that my great-grandfather bought,” Alec says. “[They are] in vaults and crazy places, in back of other things. And sometimes I go and rediscover [them]. We found a sculpture not very long ago that my father thought had been lost since my great-grandfather was dead.”

A friend of the family’s even claims that Daniel told her he owns an unknown painting by Vermeer—an artist by whom only 35 or 36 paintings are known, all in museums. Perhaps that is what Jocelyne is talking about when she claims there is a painting worth $100 million in the family vaults. “This painting will never drop [in price]. It is very rare. If you go to all the museums in the world, you will find only a couple of pieces,” says Jocelyne, but she refuses to identify the artist.

When the Wildensteins move their artworks, they do it in their own fleet of armored cars—marked with a variety of misleading corporate names—and in private jets. “No one knows what they own, so no one knows what they sell,” says a man who worked for the family until recently. “They can take a painting worth $15 million, put it on a jet for Saudi Arabia, sell it to a sheikh for cash. There’s no record. No one sees what they are selling.” Another ex-employee points out that the private-transportation system is useful for moving paintings around the world to take advantage of the best tax situations for clients.

The business was founded in 1875 by Nathan Wildenstein, a French Jew from the Alsatian village of Feigershein who had fled to Paris when the Prussian army invaded in 1870. Originally a tailor, Nathan ran a struggling bric-a-brac and antiques business before he turned to art dealing. He specialized in 18th-century French paintings, buying many of these works in junk shops before this artistic period became fashionable. As 18th-century French art grew enormously popular, Nathan became wealthy. Today, the family’s vaults are said still to contain artworks that Nathan bought—paintings by artists such as Fragonard, Boucher, and Chardin. According to Alec, it was Nathan who opened the Wildenstein gallery in New York in 1902, the London gallery in 1925, and the Buenos Aires gallery “in 1929 or 1930.” “He was a very small man with a tremendous wit. He was a great gambler,” says Alec of his great-grandfather. Nathan, who died in 1934, was by all accounts a decent man who never raced his horses under his own name, because he’d once overheard spectators at a race shouting, “Rothschild is a crook,” and he did not ever want to be spoken of that way.

Nathan’s son, Georges, who entered the business in 1910, at the age of 18, was even more brilliant than his father. “He probably had the greatest artistic eye in the family,” says a curator who knew Georges. He was also much tougher than Nathan. It was Georges who set up the Wildensteins’ famous network of spies—notaries public in French villages, art historians, and auction-house employees. For a retainer, they fed him information that made the Wildensteins legendary for their ability to know what artworks were available, where they were, and at what price. “You’d be surprised who they were—very highly placed people,” says a former auction-house official.

Georges was even more aggressive than his father had been at buying up art. One of the first dealers to anticipate how sought-after paintings by such Impressionists as Monet would later become, he bought their paintings in bulk. Although Georges didn’t care for modern art, he helped finance a high-school friend, the famed dealer Paul Rosenberg, in his efforts to popularize Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger.

Though successful, Georges was not well liked. “He was a cold man,” says a curator who knew him. “He was manipulative, manipulative,” says another art expert. In 1933, according to those close to the Wildensteins, Georges and Rosenberg ended their business dealings when Rosenberg learned that his old friend had been carrying on an affair with his wife.

In early 194l, several months after the Germans invaded France, Georges fled the country with his family and set up the business headquarters in New York. “It was sui generis,” recalls one museum curator, “this old-style, red-velvet place.” In those days, the New York gallery scene was made up of a handful of dealers—M. Knoedler & Co. and Duveen among the more prominent—and Georges quickly became one of the most formidable and controversial. In 1955 the Wildenstein gallery was accused of bugging Knoedler’s telephones—in order, it was assumed, to find out its competitor’s inventory and prices and also what customers were looking for. A gallery employee, the legendary salesman Jay Rousuck, confessed to having hired a private investigator to do the job. The incident may have been one reason why Georges was never invited to join the Art Dealers Association of America.

Daniel Wildenstein had started working for the gallery after getting his degree in art history from the Sorbonne in 1939. If his father had been known for his incredible eye and business acumen, Daniel would give his family something just as remarkable: the unprecedented power to write the history of art—and even rewrite it. He hired armies of scholars to create catalogues raisonnés, exhaustive books on individual artists and their works. Being the publisher of such books confers enormous power—the ability to authenticate paintings and to determine their location and the history of their ownership. Today, as a publisher of catalogues raisonnés, the Wildensteins virtually control the scholarship on many artists from Boucher to Monet.

Although the Wildenstein catalogues raisonnés are widely respected in the art world, “there has always been a cloud of suspicion [about them],” says one prominent art expert. Most notably, Georges’s Gauguin catalogue raisonné was publicly denounced in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965 by the well-known art historian Douglas Cooper. “Pedigrees and quotations have been juggled to suit private needs; and,” Cooper wrote, “Gauguin’s oeuvre has been shorn of some authentic works and adulterated with others that do not belong.”

One art historian recalls, “They asked me to write a catalogue raisonné, but they wouldn’t give me final authority over the contents, so I refused.”

It is a cold and wet afternoon and Jocelyne Wildenstein has lit a fire in her living room in the family’s New York town house. The room, with its high ceiling, gilded moldings, and silk-covered walls, is surprisingly cozy. Ten paintings by Bonnard hang on the walls. Jocelyne is wearing a purple knit Chanel suit with fuchsia trim and jewelry she has designed herself—a choker, bracelet, and ring, all made up of gold monkeys. Settled on one of the room’s couches, upholstered in bright-yellow embroidered silk, she is trying to recall as best she can the family’s history. She says it isn’t easy; the family didn’t talk much about its past. “I’ve never seen the pictures of Nathan,” she says. “And surprisingly when you realize, now, I’ve never seen Daniel having a picture of his parents.”

Since April, when Alec asked her for a divorce, Jocelyne has lived on the third floor of the family home, a pariah, cut off from the other family members who live there. The doors to the communal living room, library, dining room, and pool, which is in the basement, have been locked and she has not been given the keys. “Everything is closed,” she says. “Everybody goes I think to one direction [when I walk by]. They don’t turn.” Family friends, such as financier Nathaniel de Rothschild and his parents, Liliane and Élie, and Michel David-Weill, are keeping her at arm’s length.

As lavishly as they live and entertain, the Wildensteins form an insular society, friends say. “They are like a tribe,” says one. “They don’t really mix.” They live in the same houses and share their vacations. Daniel, a friend says, “hates intruders. He is antisocial.” And he sets the tone for the family. “He controls those boys the way Georges controlled him,” says one woman who knows the family well.

Georges, by all accounts, was a domineering figure. His life revolved around the gallery and his racehorses, and he expected total commitment from his family. Both Alec and Guy went to the Lycée Français in New York, but were pulled out of the school by their grandfather for several months each year when the spring racing season opened in France. The entire family would set sail on “the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mary, or the U.S.S. United States,” says Alec, and return the same way in October, when the season ended.

Daniel wed Martine Kapferer, the daughter of a wealthy French Jewish family, in 1939, in a marriage that friends say was arranged by Georges. The couple lived with him and his wife, Jeanne, throughout Georges’s life. But by the 50s, Georges had begun to lose his grip on Daniel. His son had expensive tastes, of which Georges disapproved even as he indulged them. Daniel became a regular at 122, the famous society brothel in Paris, and a frequent customer and friend of the legendary Madame Claude, who had her own celebrated prostitution ring. “Daniel was very good at 122 … that house,” Jocelyne says with a laugh. “If you wanted to go to the Devil Room or, I don’t know …, every room had a different theme.”

When Alec was a teenager, Daniel initiated him into the mysteries of paid-for sex. “I have known Madame Claude since I was fifteen and a half,” says Alec. “She was a good friend of mine. My father and I had great respect for her. I knew all her girls.” While Guy, who was still a little boy, stayed home with his grandparents and mother, Alec and Daniel hung out together, chasing women. According to Jocelyne, “People thought they were brothers.”

“Georges hated Daniel’s lifestyle—the women, the way he spent money,” says one friend of the family’s. Daniel frequented nightclubs with a girlfriend said to be an Afghan princess, and he was a fixture on the Côte d’Azur. “He was quite a playboy … good-looking and a big show-off,” says Jocelyne. “He would run barefoot from the portal of the Carleton at Cannes [and jump onto the skis in the water] to water-ski.” Eventually, Georges withdrew his support from Daniel as heir to the business in favor of Guy, only 18 at the time. “Georges really wanted it badly,” says Jocelyne. “My husband say this … [Daniel] was all the time seen in magazines. It was just too much.”

But Georges died too soon to make it happen, and Daniel took his place as the head of the business. He moved out of the family home, the Château de Marienthal, and took an apartment in Paris with his new mistress (and current wife), Sylvia Roth, a model who had once been a messenger in the early days of the Israeli army. “Poor Martine, she was sweet and out of her league,” says a friend of Daniel’s first wife. “She was stuck in the country alone while Sylvia was covered in diamonds and dancing on the tables in clubs.”

“Daniel,” Jocelyne says, “used to tell anybody who asked that he hated his parents and he was never happier than the day they died.” (His mother, Jeanne Wildenstein, died in 1964.) In 1980, Jocelyne remembers, she saw for the first time the Château de Marienthal, where Daniel was born and raised. “Everything was catastrophic,” she says. “All the furniture had covers, and on the carpets you could see all the pee of the pet Chow—the curtains were burned from the pee. Daniel, I mean, hate this house.”

“For 10 years after Georges died, Daniel would go to his grave on All Saints’ Day and get on his knees and beat the ground with his fists,” says one friend of the family’s. “He was so angry at Georges.” But people say he soon became the same kind of father. He wanted his boys always close to him, going so far as to forbid Alec to go to college, insisting that he could learn all he needed to know about the family business by working in the gallery. For many years, he refused to let his boys marry. “He did not want us to get married,” Alec says. “He considered marriage an unnatural state.” Alec married Jocelyne in Las Vegas in 1978 without telling Daniel, who refused to go to their wedding reception in Switzerland.

There is no question, friends say, that Daniel adored his boys, but he was hard on both of them. “He would put Alec and Guy down in front of horse trainers, in front of everyone. He used to scream at Alec until Alec would get sick in the bathroom of the yacht [the 168-foot Southern Breeze, which the family has since sold],” one friend recalls. “I mean, what was the point of being on the best boat in the world, with the best food and the best servants, when this nightmare was going on?” Still, the family stuck close together.

Like his father, Daniel was such a powerful force in the art world that he could hold in abeyance all the whispers about the secrets of their fabulous collection. The Kann-manuscript controversy and other incidents, however, have focused attention once again on Georges Wildenstein and the period when he fled France in 1941 for New York City.

“I have made a point not to see Daniel,” says Alain Vernay, a journalist and the grandson of the celebrated French Jewish art collector Adolph Schloss. “What is the use of telling him about his father? He knows.” He is referring to the charge, made privately by others, that Georges Wildenstein collaborated with the Nazis, selling paintings to Hitler and allegedly even helping the Nazis locate, through Georges’s representative in Paris, important collections that had been hidden from them.

“It was my father,” Vernay recalls, “who received a call in Nice, and Georges came to see him at the Hôtel Royale at his suite. Georges told him he could be an ‘honorary Aryan’ [the status given to Jews regarded as helpful on key issues]—himself, his wife, my mother’s three brothers—and have a sum in dollars in Switzerland in a special account if we gave the location of our collection. He said he was asked by the Germans to [ask my father for this arrangement].”

The Schloss collection was one of France’s greatest, known for its Dutch and Flemish masters. The family had hidden it in a château in central France but were finally forced to reveal the whereabouts of the collection in April 1943, when the Nazis arrested them.

“My father kicked Wildenstein out and he never came back,” says Vernay. As he remembers it, this meeting took place in early 1941.

According to documents in the U.S. National Archives, the previous November Georges had met in Aix-en-Provence with Hitler’s chief art dealer, Karl Haberstock, and, over a period of “4 or 5 days” he made a deal. The Germans would return to him part of his collection, confiscated by them from a hiding place in a castle in Sourches, and allow one of his trusted non-Jewish employees, Roger Dequoy, to run the Paris gallery. In return, Georges agreed to sell to Hitler and his top officials anything they wanted out of his own stock and to help them find any other artworks they were interested in.

Soon thereafter, Georges left France for New York, with his wife, Jeanne, 23-year-old Daniel and his wife, Martine, and Alec, who had been born in Marseilles several months earlier. While Georges spent the war years in the United States, many of his artworks, as per the agreement, were returned to his Paris gallery. Dequoy, whom one of the American O.S.S. interrogators, Theodore Rousseau, would later identify as “perhaps the worst of the collaborationists among the dealers,” worked hand in hand with Hitler’s art dealer Haberstock. According to accounts based on archival material— in Feliciano’s The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas’s award-winning 1995 The Rape of Europa—Dequoy, on behalf of the Wildensteins, sold paintings to Göring and other high Nazi officials and, in one deal that fell through, was ready to take possession of a group of stolen Impressionist paintings that the Nazis, who regarded them as “degenerate art,” were dumping.

After the war, efforts by the French government to bring charges against the Wildenstein firm were rejected by the courts on the ground that there was “no proof of voluntary sales to the enemy,” according to The Rape of Europa. Safely in the United States, Georges “became a champion for restitution,” says Marc Masurovsky, head of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. Georges wrote an article for a French Resistance magazine in 1943 denouncing collaborationist art dealers—a tour de force of denial, many in the art world thought. “I think Georges almost believed he did not collaborate,” says Masurovsky. “He made himself a victim.”

Alec adamantly denies that his grandfather collaborated with the Nazis. Says Alec, “As far as my father remembers, there never was … He never even remembers a meeting [with Haberstock].” Alec says that the O.S.S. team of interrogators was prejudiced against Georges by dealers “that hated my grandfather.” He believes that Haberstock may have made the story up. Jonathan Petropoulos, a historian at Loyola College in Baltimore, who has studied Haberstock’s life, believes he was telling the truth. “If anything, he was lying by omission about Dequoy, underplaying it,” says Petropoulos.

The only way to know the true extent of the alleged collaboration would be to examine the contents of the Wildenstein vaults and files. For years people have speculated that the vaults contain art looted by the Nazis and taken in trade by Dequoy. The suspicions are strong, but there is no smoking gun. “You can’t get their records without a subpoena, and who knows if Georges didn’t sanitize the files?” says one historian. In fact, the Wildensteins have been caught with works from the Nazi plunder only once, in the 1950s, when they were found to have a set of 15th-century enamels that had belonged to Poland’s Czartoryski family before the war. The Wildensteins settled with the Czartoryskis.

But the current controversy over the Kann manuscripts has put the art world on alert. Masurovsky, for one, is interested in the collection of the late Florence Gould, the daughter-in-law of the great robber baron Jay Gould. The collection was created largely by Daniel in the 60s and 70s and sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 1985. According to Masurovsky, the provenance of some of the paintings in the collection is murky, and it is still not clear how they ended up in Wildenstein hands. “Wildenstein,” says Masurovsky, “was one of the few dealers in New York at the time that could pull it off, the westward drift of stolen art.”

According to Willi Korte, a German lawyer who has devoted his life to tracking down artworks looted by the Nazis, “Pick any Impressionist major artist and read the provenance objectively. You’ll find many instances of a great deal of detail until the late 30s or early 40s, and then no names, no dates, even just blanks, and then Wildenstein pops up in the 50s.”

But Alec is firm that any such charges are “absolutely ludicrous.” “My grandfather was a Jew,” he says. “There is no reason he would have met anybody in the German army.”

There is no evidence that Daniel Wildenstein participated in his father’s alleged wartime activities. But over the years, Daniel did hear the whispered allegations. He knew, says one friend, that for many years there were prominent French Jewish families, like the Schloss heirs, who would not deal with the Wildensteins because of Georges. But Daniel greeted their contempt with his own. “He would say, ‘People hate us because they are jealous,’ ” recalls one woman. “But I think the criticism made him bitter and isolated.” Although his grandchildren have been raised as Jews and although his second wife, Sylvia, is Israeli, Daniel has been criticized for his reluctance to donate to Jewish charities. He has also baffled friends by his refusal to set foot in Israel. Indeed, Jocelyne says she was told by Daniel she could not hold her son’s Bar Mitzvah in Israel, because Daniel would not attend.

Within the family, friends and former employees say, the rumors about Georges’s wartime past were never discussed. “Even if Daniel knew what happened,” says a friend of Alec and Guy’s, “he would not tell his children.” As the rumors began to appear in the press—most notably in a 1991 Spy article, by Jonathan Napack—the family virtually ignored them. As it does today. “There is no reaction,” says Jocelyne Wildenstein, “because they are so sure of the power they have. They think they are above it.”

These days, Daniel Wildenstein spends most of his time at the family’s Paris headquarters, updating his art archives and overseeing the research on more Wildenstein catalogues raisonnés. Evenings are spent quietly with Sylvia. They had lived together for 14 years before Daniel finally married her, shortly after Alec married Jocelyne in 1978 and just before Guy married Kristina Hannson, a Swedish former model. Like Jocelyne, Sylvia grew up without much money, the daughter of Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to Israel. She is widely liked. “She’s delightful,” says one prominent socialite. “Her mother used to wear white plastic boots, and Sylvia would laugh and say, ‘See what money can buy?’ She’s very funny and very kind, and although she lives this rarefied life, she knows [that wealth isn’t everything]. The rest of them believe it. She keeps a picture of herself holding a machine gun on her side table. She knows.”

Among the Wildensteins, Sylvia is the one who is most willing to acknowledge that the family is facing serious trouble. Over lunch at Stresa, a Paris restaurant where she goes every day to meet friends, she has talked freely about how upset she is about Alec and Jocelyne’s divorce; how concerned she is for Daniel, who is diabetic; and how the stress of the scandal is affecting him. As people such as Masurovsky and Korte begin to focus on the Wildenstein holdings and as the possibility grows of a divorce trial that could force the family to divulge financial and business documents, Daniel, friends say, seems determined to fight back. If any of his friends or family members disagree with Daniel’s behavior these days, they aren’t going to tell him. Sylvia, his sons—everyone, says Jocelyne, fears crossing him. “He has all the power.”

And that, more than any of the crises facing the Wildensteins now, may be the biggest threat to the future of the family dynasty. Today, Alec and Guy are often dismissed as lightweights by art dealers and even some collectors. “A couple of playboys,” one dealer calls them, “who happened to inherit the most considerable gallery in the world.” “Rich boys,” says another dealer dismissively, echoing the general impression of Guy, who has become best known for his polo playing, and Alec, best known for his game hunting.

Nowadays, Guy handles much of the administration of the gallery, and Alec functions as its lead salesman. Friends and former employees say that they do have talent, although evidence of it has been buried under Daniel’s domineering presence. It was Alec, for instance, who wooed David-Weill, one of the world’s greatest art collectors, selling him the long-lost Psyche, among other paintings. And although few people are aware of it, both Alec and Guy have orchestrated major deals, and Alec has authored a catalogue raisonné, on the painter Odilon Redon. “The boys know their art, they know their clients and their tastes,” insists one collector. The problem, friends say, is that they have almost no influence over major decisions.

“Daniel is the one who sets the prices, he is the one who declares, This is a Cézanne from this period, and this is what it’s worth,” says a former employee. “When you see the three of them together,” says one man who knows the family, “Daniel does all the talking and the boys add only elements. I went to see Daniel recently, and Guy was sitting in the office and he didn’t say a word.”

There are those who believe that the worst thing Daniel has done for the Wildenstein empire has been to infantilize his sons. “He raised cripples,” says one friend of the family’s. “Alec is very funny and very smart. If his father had let him go to university, he’d be really running this company. If their father had let them grow normally, they’d be amazing. There wouldn’t be this mess if it weren’t for Daddy.”

Jocelyne says that Daniel’s control has weighed heavily on Alec. “I think at a certain point he was getting depressed,” she says. “Alec is the one who really deals with the racehorses, but everything goes to his father, nothing comes to him. He is the one who [bought] one day Allez France as a foal in America, the best horse ever seen in France.”

Some in the art world believe that the Wildensteins have lost their aggressiveness as Daniel has aged but has refused to let go. “Their power today in certain ways is more latent than active,” says one dealer. “If they wanted, they could use it to dominate the business. But this generation is not as aggressive as the preceding ones.” To a certain extent, factors beyond the Wildensteins’ control have affected the way they do business: the growing dominance of the auction houses over the market, and the increasing amount of art held by the world’s museums, which diminishes the supply available to dealers. But the Wildensteins, people say, have also been strangely passive in recent years and stuck in the ways of the past. “A lot of people think that the behavior of the Wildensteins is due to sneakiness, but I think it has a lot to do with incompetence,” says one man who has done business with the gallery. “It is a very old-fashioned firm, in its arrogance and in its approach to business.”

It has long been Daniel’s dream, friends say, to be remembered not so much as an art dealer but as a great art historian, as the man who financed valuable research into art and whose own work made him an authority on artists such as Monet and Manet. “I’m not involved in the galleries. I’m only interested in books and art history,” he said when his final volume on Monet was published in 1992.

That his dream could be about to go up in smoke, that the empire his family worked so hard to build might be about to crumble, does not seem to have occurred to Daniel. “The publicity, the scandal,” says his friend André Ben Lassin, a businessman and financier. “He doesn’t care.”